Carnifex - World War X

image
Carnifex have been contributing to anchoring deathcore to its death metal roots for over a decade now, and I have appreciated their earnestness in their drive to bring the most brutal out of deathcore without resorting to the typical hardcore tactics of their contemporaries. They’re not making it more difficult than it has to be, and their catalog is a relatively simple one to sort through and order in terms of favorites. They have albums that are more vibrant and vital than others; I personally enjoyed their previous LP in 2016, Slow Death, as well as 2010′s Hell Chose Me and 2014′s Die Without Hope.
And with that up-and-down discography has come the possibility of a simply less impactful offering of deathcore right after one of their best, which is the unfortunate, yet not too surprising reality of World War X: an album that by no means defiles Carnifex’s name or sinks their career into abysmal depths, but one that just isn’t as ripe with potent cuts as it could be.
I like Carnifex, I really do, but this new album just felt so below their weight and so stale for them with its lack of imaginative compositions and predictable adherence to their established formula. I was really hoping for more after the string of solid albums preceding it, hoping the Bury Me in Blasphemy EP in 2018 would be more of a derusting of the gears rather than an indication of the humdrum to come. It’s not offensively poor or anything like that, just subpar for a band that seemed to be in good form not too long ago.
I’m not mad/10

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeal & Ardor - Stranger Fruit

Image
Even though it had been in on their Bandcamp page since 2016, I was glad the more official release of Zeal & Ardor’s debut album,  Devil Is Fine , last year gave me the opportunity to talk about it (since I started this blog in 2017). Originally one of multiple solo music projects by creative eccentric Manuel Gagneux, inspired by a comical suggestion on 4Chan, Gagneux recruited ful-time members to form a complete performing band after the huge wave  Devil Is Fine  made, and I have been so pleased to see this project grow in its short time from the enthusiasm much of the metal community has shown for such an unorthodox artist. Devil Is Fine  was a short, but wildly diverse album (only 25 minutes) that blended the soulful blues of slave spirituals and other American folk with varyingly atmospheric black metal, a idea that could have gone terribly that fortunately went terrifically. While I loved  Devil Is Fine  and had it as one of my top top favorit...
Read more

Pensées Nocturnes - Grand Guignol Orchestra

Image
I have stated my distaste for the overdone try-hard edginess of the dark carnival aesthetic in film and television (and separating the band Avatar from that aesthetic has been a necessary task for me to prepare myself for their music), but something about applying it to the self-aware campiness of metal had me kind of intrigued to see what the exaggerated horror of metal could do for the often butchered scary circus aesthetic. I mentioned not too long ago that metal has always had its foot in parody through excess, and after all, isn’t the whole carnival thing supposed to be excessively cartoonish itself too? Maybe it could work. And that seems to be the hypothesis by which Pensées Nocturnes have approached this album. Pensées Nocturnes are a french band who have been rather prolific over the past decade,  Grand Guignol Orchestra  being the group’s sixth full-length album over the course of their decade-long existence. And the band have consistently sought to tinker and ...
Read more

Saor - Forgotten Paths

Image
Just as the new year delivered a new pair of Panopticon songs, so it gave us a new album from Andy Marshall’s Saor, a similarly naturalistic and folky solo project blending Scottish, rather than Appalachian, folk music with the transcendence of ambient black metal. In the visceral energy of this typically dark music form, Marshall finds strength and fortitude in the connection he makes with it to the natural world. Despite Marshall’s tendency toward sprawling compositions, their presentation of only three of them with one short outro cut to round them off clocks  Forgotten Paths  in at just over thrity-eight minutes. And in those thirty-eight minutes, Marshall really doesn’t do much more than channel the basic essence of his project. The opening title song jumps into the rushing swells of blast beats and black metal tremolo picking turned inside out to channel the silent emphatic resilience of the natural world itself portrayed so romantically in the song’s lyrics, soon e...
Read more